I think their huge mistake was announcing a bunch of stuff (Apple Intelligence) that ended up being vaporware.

My guess is that they're also adapting to the changing ecosystem, and since they move very slowly, the trends seem archaic (like Apple Intelligence featuring image and summary generation 12-18 months after it was found to be novel by anyone).

I'm hoping that they lean in hard on their intents API forming a sort of "MCP" like ecosystem. That will be very powerful, and worth spending extra time perfecting.

Yeah they announced way too early, they probably didn't expect so much movement in the market (and to be fair it doesn't seem like it needs to be so volatile, GPT5's lackluster release feels like evidence of this)

leaks seem to indicate they're working on some home AI assistant, which kind of lends to their typical lagging timeline with the goal of quality